The official statement reads, “It is with a heavy heart that we write this, but tomorrow, January 15, 2014, will be the last day of operations for U4iA Games. Our sincere apologies to all of our fantastic, supportive fans over these last few years – we wish we could have done better for you. Thank you very much for your support and we hope to see you again on the other side.”

In addition, Dunham took to Twitter today to announce that the studio will close today.

So, we found out in the blink of an eye that @U4iaGames was shutting down today. Huge shout-out to my co-workers. Great people.

The decision to close U4iA Games will see 26 staff members looking for work, after it was formed in 2011 by former Activision employees Dusty Welch and Chris Archer. GI.biz adds that Welch was a core member of the original Call of Duty team, and in releasing Offensive Combat on mobile and tablet formats, had hoped to build on that success.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2014/01/15/offensive-combat-studio-u4ia-games-to-close-statement/feed/0Zipper: MAG still “amongst the most played online PS3 games out there”http://www.vg247.com/2010/11/15/zipper-mag-still-amongst-the-most-played-online-ps3-games-out-there/
http://www.vg247.com/2010/11/15/zipper-mag-still-amongst-the-most-played-online-ps3-games-out-there/#commentsMon, 15 Nov 2010 07:31:08 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=129175

Thought MAG was dying following news of Zipper Interactive working on a new SOCOM game? Think again.

Speaking via the game’s official forum in response to a user who said the game was struggling even to keep up with SOCOM Confrontation’s numbers, Zipper community boss Jeremy Dunham said this was far from being the case.

“This is incorrect – MAG has more concurrent players than SOCOM Confrontation worldwide on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This has been true for every month since MAG’s release on January 26,” he said.

“Obviously we don’t hit the same numbers we had in our first few months in terms of concurrent and daily users, but we’re still amongst the most played online PS3 games out there.”

MAG is currently approaching it’s first anniversary. The MAG 2.0 update was released a few months back, adding in PlayStation Move support, while this month saw the arrival of the Escalation pack.

Zipper’s next game, SOCOM 4, will be released next year, and will also include support for PlayStation Move.

For $0.99 per added slot, players can select the extra character they want to unlock and create a brand new persona. These supplementary character subscriptions will last for 30 days from the day they’ve been purchased, but don’t fret if you decide not to renew one or both of them immediately. Once your extra characters have been created, they reside safely dormant on the MAG server until activated for subscription once again.

The slots will not be live until the PSN is updated, so if you don’t see the slots right away, check back later.

Jeremy Dunham, senior community manager for Zipper Interactive, has announced over on the US PS Blog the developer has added Faction Neutral to the Sabotage maps in MAG.

Faction Neutral went live on Thursday, and what this means is if you’ve wanted to play “against the Valor PMC as a member of the competing Raven Industries on a map that belonged to the third faction, SVER”, you can now do so.

All you have to do is log into the game, select Sabotage as the game mode with your PMC choice and then let loose.

If you’ve not played MAG in a while, are a fan, and have been worried about any altering of support to the servers – no worry needed. Ken Inagaku, staff producer at SCEA said there are still a number of log-ins each day.

“MAG continues to record a strong and steady number of player account logins each day and boasts a robust community that has up to this date logged 1.27 billion kills and a total of 1.11 million games played,” Inagaku told Kotaku.

“SCEA and Zipper are fully committed to supporting MAG indefinitely.

“Since launch, MAG has received seven patches that have been a direct result of community feedback. We continue to listen to our players and implement new features on a consistent basis [like] Sabotage maps going faction-neutral. Community support goes beyond new content and features with our Double XP and “Play with Zipper” events.

“Future DLC [is] coming this summer, including Clan Wars, more faction-neutral maps, additional character slots, the ability for all three factions to wage war in one map, and much more.

“Stay tuned for additional announcements as we continue to expand the Shadow War.”

So, there you have it. Faction Neutral, loads of people are still playing, more goodies are on the way.

Good to hear. Sounds like a great time to start playing again if you haven’t.